Artist Houses & Housing for Artists: Inquiry into the Typology of Artists’ Houses and Workshops in Antwerp (16th to 18th century).

Even today the image of 16th and 17th-century artists’ houses is still associated with iconic personalities such as Rubens. Reduced either to a facade or to a collector’s space as imagined in contemporary painting, it is mostly based on romanticized reconstructions. Yet historic towns held many active artists of different level and social status, in houses with workshops the size, character and value of which varied accordingly. My experience as a building historian and my doctoral research on private housing in 16th-century Antwerp revealed that a significant sample is traceable, even subsists, and can be studied via archival and archaeological research.

This postdoctoral investigation proposes to explore an as yet undiscovered aspect of the Antwerp art scene during the 16th and 17th centuries, in order to add new layers to its rich material, intellectual, social and economic history. Among cities with a considerable art production in the early modern period, Antwerp constitutes a case of major importance, which sheds a new light on a number of issues relevant to the broader European context. Systematic inquiry would add significantly to the knowledge of the private life and work of its best-known artists as well as of many more craftsmen of lesser note. It would considerably help to understand mechanisms of training, production, trade, and social life of an important but heterogeneous group of citizens which made Antwerp into one of the most famous cities of its time.